SubscribeWe showed off the rocket launcher at Tytler school the other day.
We brought the kids plenty of candy – but to get it they had to make an armor piercing rocket 
They got pretty clever pretty fast…
Tytler School Demo
Simple Kid’s Drawing Table
Bashed this table together quickly over the weekend for our youngest daughter. There’s nothing terribly groundbreaking here. A simple plywood top, rounded and routered to make nice edges. My wife, older daughter and I painted after the young one’s bedtime over the weekend, then some simple legs and a lot of varnish. The legs are easily replaceable, so the table can grow as she does.
What I did love about this is how easy everything is when you have the tools and space to do things right. The actual time spent in the workshop was minuscule, but my daughter now has something that she will hopefully treasure for years to come.
Backup your Mac to remote server
There are quite a few examples out there in how to use rsync to duplicate how Timemachine does its backups.
This is the article which first inspired me. http://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html
But I still had some problems with it. Firstly you either had to pull the backup from the Mac. My Mac is not on all the time. Least of all at night when backups are normally made.
The other option pushed the backup from the Mac but then you had to have SSH access to the Linux server that you were backing up to. Difficult to setup and not too secure because of the public/private key authentication scheme to avoid typing in your password.
So this is what I came up with.
Rsync Server on Linux:
The first thing you should setup is a Linux server that has plenty disk for the backups and has rsync installed. Your Mac(s) will be connecting to this server with rsync and transferring files to it.
I’m not going to do through the whole rsync installation. There are quite a few guides on the Internet for that. I will just describe my setup and leave you to fill in the rest.
I am using Debian 5.0 with rsync version 3.0.3.
Here is what my /etc/rsyncd.conf
###### uid = root gid = backup use chroot = yes max connections = 4 syslog facility = local5 pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid [mac] path = /Public/Backup-Mac comment = Backup directory for Bunny's Mac read only = false ######
That requires a bit of explaining.
I am using ‘chroot’ which I am told is more secure. If you want to be even more secure I would suggest you change the ‘uid’ and ‘gid’ to something other than ‘root’.
You will notice that I am using rsync ‘modules’. The [mac] portion is sort of like a Samba mount for rsync and it defines where the Mac’s will be putting their files. Read up on rsync ‘modules’ as they really are powerful.
I have a 2 TB disk mounted on /media/Backup-Mac which is where rsync will put all the Mac’s backup files. Here is what the disk looks like.
######
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 2011-11-15 12:15 . drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 0 2011-11-15 16:20 .. drwxr-xr-x 3 root backup 4096 2011-10-12 14:48 backup-2011-11-12 drwxr-xr-x 3 root backup 4096 2011-10-13 09:03 backup-2011-11-13 drwxr-xr-x 3 root backup 4096 2011-10-14 09:37 backup-2011-11-14 drwxr-xr-x 3 root backup 4096 2011-11-15 10:43 backup-2011-11-15 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2011-11-15 12:17 current -> backup-2011-11-15 drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2011-10-12 14:35 lost+found
######
That’s it for the Linux side.
Mac client side:
The real power of rsync is it will synchronize 2 directories very efficiently. It only transfers the changes and nothing else. The initial sync can take a long time but from there it is very fast in keeping things the same. Great for the WiFi link I use.
The other power of rsync is it’s ability to use hardlinks for incremental backups. That means that you can have what appears to be ‘snapshots’ of your files from a series of days but they take up only as much space as 1 complete backup plus the daily changes. See the article above for details on how rsync uses hardlinks.
The benefit of using hardlinks is when you take a look at one days backup you have the entire files structure just as it would have been on you Mac. This makes retrieving files as easy as navigating the directories.
Here is the script that I use on the Mac side:
######
#!/bin/sh DATE=$(date "+%Y-%m-%d") HOST="tecra" MODULE="mac" BWLIMIT="5000" REMOTE_DIR="backup-$DATE" LOCAL_DIR="/Users" rsync -azP --bwlimit=$BWLIMIT --link-dest=/current --exclude-from=/etc/rsync.exclude $LOCAL_DIR $HOST::$MODULE/$REMOTE_DIR cd /var/tmp mkdir current cd current rsync -rv --delete --include=current '--exclude=*' . $HOST::$MODULE ln -s backup-$DATE ./current rsync -azP current $HOST::$MODULE cd / rm -rf /var/tmp/current #####
The meat of the script is the ‘rsync’ line. It is similar to most of the other examples on the Internet. I use ‘bwlimit’ to make sure I don’t swamp the WiFi link with the backup.
Most, if no all, people use SSH to create the ‘current’ link on the remove server. I figured out a way to do it just via rsync. The bit after the rsync command is where it gets done.
Shop plan development 71b Wyhdam Street
Hello fellow DIYodes
I am drawing up a floor plan for the hackers space to facilitate the locating of tools, benches and work spaces at 71b Wyndham Street. Included below is 2D floor plans drawing and a 3D renderings of the work shop and meeting room. These images will be updated as the plan progresses. Development of the shop plan will be discussed at the DIYode meetings on Monday evenings. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions for the plan. I can be reached at crazyas8@gmail.com
Best regards,
Edward Jackson
Shop Floorplan
3D Rendering
Floor Plan Meeting Room
3D Rendering
Tools of the Zombie Apocalypse
Sitting around over beers a while back, we were talking about ways that we can be evangelizing DIY, what we can do to highlight the importance of not letting these skills fade away in our society. Someone made the offhanded comment that if we don’t succeed, then when the Zombie Apocolypse comes, we’ll all be screwed. And hence, an idea was born.
What I’d like to do is put together an historical exhibit titled ‘Tools of the Zombie Apocalypse: How Makers Saved The World‘. It would feature a number of functional battle-scarred artifacts from the great zombie war, items made from the scavenged bones of a failed civilization, and would showcase the ingenuity-under-fire of a small group of geek survivors. On a more practical scale, it would underscore the importance of maintaining DIY skills in a culture that is turning its back on them.
I am currently looking into possible sources of funding, I figure we’ll need somewhere between $10,000 and $25,000, depending on how ambitious we get. But once I reach that goal, it’ll be time for our Zurvival Weekend. Over the course of three days, we will attempt to answer the follow question.
“A group of skilled and ingenious makers are trapped in a Canadian Tire at the outset of the Zombie Apocolypse. They have enough food and water for three days. Survival beyond that will depend on scavenging, rescuing other survivors, growing food, and keeping the local zombie population in check. What will they drive out of there at the end of the weekend?’
We’ll gather interested people from the Guelph community, lock ourselves away for the weekend, and build some fabulous things. Then, of course, we’ll have to battle-test them, write the narrative for each piece, and assemble the exhibit. Eventually, I envision it being a travelling exhibit, something that could go to different galleries, visit maker faires, and similar fringe festivals.
But what I’m talking about here, is the zombie apocalypse done right. In movies, books, games, whatever, everything is done wrong. Stupid risks are taken, poor weapons are selected, and above all, survivors fight instead of cooperating. No-one does it right, because there’s less drama that way. But by telling the story through the artifacts instead of through a narrative, we can have the freedom to do things right, and keep it engaging, and above all else, show how DIY ingenuity can one day save the world.
The Pathology of DIY
I think it was Carl Sagan who first said “If you are going to make a patio from scratch, first you must invent the universe”. I’m not sure if Carl was pro or anti DIY (I’d like to think ‘pro’) but it strikes a nerve, nonetheless.
You see, it would seem that I am incapable of doing things the easy way. When I wanted a specific t-shirt design, I couldn’t just get it printed online for $15. It wasn’t enough, even, to drop $100 on a photo emulsion screen printing kit. Nope. I had to make the frames, stretch the screens, mix my own potassium bichromate photoresist, and build a custom drying cabinet for screen preparation. I’m kinda stupid that way.
So when our deck started getting too old to use, and my wife saw that familiar gleam in my eye, she knew it meant trouble.
The first 10 stones
Now, I will admit that I put my wife through a lot, and she is nothing if not supportive of my own particular mental illness. But this time, I think she shares at least some of the blame.
You see, she was the one who first found the hexagonal pattern in a photo of a marketplace in Tenerife. It was a simple repeating hexagon with three partial arcs inlaid into it. When laid down in an inconsistent pattern, the arcs make a spaghetti plate of meandering paths. She was the one that used it in an art quilt that now hangs in our front hall.
So when we first discussed ripping out the deck and putting in a patio, I pointed at the quilt, and said “I want that”.
Of course, no-one makes such a patio stone. You can’t go down to Home Depot and come home with a carload. You can, however, come home with a 5 pounds of plaster of paris, a custom built carving jig, 2 gallons of brush-on molding rubber, a cement mixer, 120 bags of sand-mix cement, and a bucket of iron oxide colouring. You can do all this, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it.
People might just call you pathological.
Rocket Piñata
For the last year or so, we’ve been using rocket launchers, based loosely on the Make Magazine design, as a community outreach tool, taking them around to various community events and letting kids build and fire their rockets. Recently though, I wanted to up the ante a bit, and give the kids a reason to take care with their rocket building. Target practise was the obvious answer, but you know what’s better than targets? Targets that vomit candy and toys when you hit them, that’s what.
I started out with four balloons tied at their knots, classic flour and water papiér maché, taking care to make the walls as thin as I could. Our last piñata for my daughters birthday party was so solid, it took a grown man with a baseball bat, walloping it against a concrete floor to break it. I can still hear the kids crying. No, for this one, one layer of paper, with a second ‘patch job’ to just fill in any gaps. The resulting piñata felt flimsy enough that I felt the need to be extra careful transporting it.
For piñata fillings, I had to be careful too. The plan was to hang this thing 40′ up in a tree on a hot day, so chocolate was out, so was anything heavy, like the 12 large rubber bouncy balls that I bought. (As a side note, our local Old Navy has a bubble gum machine that spits out large kick-ass bouncy balls for a quarter. Best bouncy ball deal out there). I also stuffed a couple of sheets of dollar store tissue paper in the piñata to slow the candy down from a single puncture.
To get the pinñata into the tree, we used a rocket to fire a string over a branch that was about 40′ up. The launcher was set at about a 15º angle from the piñata.
As for the rockets themselves, the kids typically run with their own ideas, but our official design for these have evolved over time. We have rolling tubes for making the body out of letter-sized paper and masking tape. These have three strips of packing tape applied lengthwise, so that the rockets are not too tight over the launch tube. An end cap under the nose cone has proven to be very useful to prevent nose cone blowouts. We also have a nose cone jig that makes rolling nose cones a snap. This was made from a drumstick ice cream wrapper, filled with a glue and lentil mix to firm it up. Fins are cut from this pattern. If cut, folded and taped carefully, they’ll provide a stable and aerodynamic fin profile with a 1.5º rifle, giving the rocket added stability.
Our launcher has an adjustable incline, and an integrated pressure gauge, making it good for repeatable accuracy firing. I’d ideally like to refit it with a cammed clutch for inclination adjustments, and a built in inclinometer.
We introduced the world to rocket piñata at our park party on June 18th. We had a table where the kids could make their rockets, tons of supplies, and lots of kids. The rocket designs ranged from precise and well-built to super creative (one had leaves for fins) to completely wobbly. At thirty feet, about 1 in 4 rockets were able to hit it, As for the piñata, it ate 6 rockets whole before finally giving up and spewing forth it’s delicious contents. All in all, a raving success. We’ll be doing this again.
Impromptu Fixit
Someone recently brought in a lamp that was in need of repair and Simon, James and Ken took on the challenge. Here’s a few pix of the process.
Assess the problem
Remove the broken parts
Test Fit
Final Adjustments
Success!
Musagetes and 1 Mile Squared
Over the last week, Mary Mattingly, a New York based artist has been in Guelph for the Musagetes Sponsored 1Mile2 event. She and a number of volunteers have been inhabiting the Diyode workshop over the week, secretly toiling away on a ‘wearable architecture’ project.
We don’t know yet what their final piece will look like, but if it’s anything like Mary’s other works, it will be spectacular.
See also:
Muagetes and 1Mile2
Mary’s website
Rebecca Derickson’s blog